Upwards social mobility has started to stall, a major new study found yesterday.

People are now more likely to move down the social ladder, with young workers finding it harder than their parents to climb out of the income bracket into which they were born.

The research project, carried out by Oxford academics, discovered that there has been a slowdown in openings in the professions and management.

Stuck: Young workers are finding it harder than their parents to climb out of the income bracket into which they were born, a study has found

Their report was based on the lives of 20,000 people born in 1946, 1958, 1970 and between 1980 and 1984. The team looked at children’s progress against the seven classes used by the Office for National Statistics to gauge social standing.

These run from managers and professionals at the top, through to small business operators in the middle and those in ‘routine occupations’ at the bottom of the scale.

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The study found that from the 1950s to the 1980s there was a major expansion of professional and managerial employment, with ever more ‘room at the top’.

But researchers claimed that expansion has slowed down, and young people now have less favourable prospects than their parents had when they were young – with managerial jobs tending to go to children whose parents were already working at a similar level.

Going up or down? There has been a slowdown in openings in the professions and management, the study said

The report said: ‘The chances of a child with a higher professional or managerial father ending up in a similar position rather than in a wage-earning working-class position are up to 20 times greater than these same chances for a child with a working-class father.’

Lead researcher Professor Erzsébet Bukodi, from the Oxford University Department of Social Policy, said: ‘There is a clear change in the direction of mobility. Over the past four decades, the experience of upward mobility has become less common, and going down the social ladder has become more common.’

Study co-author Dr John Goldthorpe said: ‘Politicians are saying that a new generation of young people don’t have the same opportunities for social advancement as their parents, and these results seem to bear that out.

‘More mobility is going in a downward direction than in the past. The emerging situation is one for which there is little historical precedent and that carries potentially far-reaching political and wider social implications.’

Last autumn David Cameron’s Downing Street Tory predecessor Sir John Major declared that ‘every single sphere of British influence’ was run by people who went to independent schools and came from the ‘affluent middle class’. He added that he was ‘outraged on behalf of the people abandoned when social mobility is lost’.